Why aim for disruption?

There are many reasons company leaders don't invest in disruptive innovation. It is perceived as risky, costly, and hard to measure. But Nottingham Spirk has spent 50 years perfecting the optimal approach to disruptive innovation across a variety of product categories. We call it Vertical Innovation™ and it takes place in our revolutionary Innovation Center in Cleveland, Ohio, which is large enough to house every resource and every type of product development and commercialization expertise that our project teams need.

With all the above in one place, we can assemble versatile, multidisciplinary project teams that bring varied experiences and perspectives to each new venture. We build these Vertical Innovation teams according to the demands of the project, and work together at every stage from ideation through product launch. Designers and engineers sit in on focus groups, market researchers weigh in on prototypes, and any of them might visit the manufacturing factory floor.

Working with NS

Our goal is to get your new product to market, whatever it takes.

When we partner with another company, we work with the partner’s senior-most executives to identify and appoint an internal “champion” for the project. The champion is our primary (though certainly not only) contact and is responsible for facilitating communication and driving progress between meetings of the NS and partner-client’s teams. In the beginning, we spend a lot of time discussing and planning for the realignments that might be necessary within the partner’s organization to see the project to completion.

Innovation is not a tidy, linear process that maps itself readily to measurable scorecards. It can be messy, chaotic and plodding. Helping partners with traditional corporate cultures understand this, and to make adjustments in support of the ambiguity — not just because it’s inevitable but because it’s beneficial — is another layer of our work with partners, separate from core disciplines such as insights, design and engineering.

Innovation is an “Infinite Game”

Smart companies understand that business competition is not a sprint, or even a marathon; it’s what Simon Sinek calls an “infinite game,” in which the players and rules can change without warning, and the objective is to keep playing as long as possible.